Chiral secondary and tertiary amines are important building blocks in pharmaceutical industry. There are no efficient biocatalytic routes known to produce this class of chiral amine compounds. The existing chemical methods use chiral boron reagents or multi step synthesis.
There are a few reports in the literature of the biocatalytic synthesis of secondary amines. Whole cells of the anaerobic bacterium Acetobacterium woodii imine reductase activity was reported to reduce benzylidine imines and butylidine imines (Chadha, et al., 2008, Tetrahedron: Asymmetry. 19: 93-96). Another report uses benzaldehyde or butyraldehyde and butyl amine or aniline in aqueous medium using whole cells of Acetobacterium woodii (Stephens et al., 2004, Tetrahedron. 60:753-758). Streptomyces sp. GF3587 and GF3546 were reported to reduce 2-methyl-1-pyrroline stereoselectively (Mitsukara et al., 2010, Org. Biomol. Chem. 8:4533-4535).
One challenge in developing a biocatalytic route for this type of reaction is the identification of an enzyme class that could be engineered to provide to carry out such reactions efficiently under industrially applicable conditions. Opine dehydrogenases are a class of oxidoreductase that act on CH—NH bonds using NADH or NADPH as co-factor. A native reaction of the opine dehydrogenases is the reductive amination of α-keto acids with amino acids. At least five naturally occurring genes having some homology have been identified that encode enzymes having the characteristic activity of opine dehydrogenase class. These five enzymes include: opine dehydrogenase from Arthrobactor Sp. Strain 1C (CENDH); octopine dehydrogenase from Pecten maximus (great scallop) (OpDH); ornithine synthase from Lactococcus lactis K1 (CEOS); β-alanine opine dehydrogenase from Cellana grata (BADH); and tauropine dehydrogenase from Suberites domuncula (TauDH). The crystal structure of the opine dehydrogenase CENDH has been determined (see Britton et al., “Crystal structure and active site location of N-(1-D-carboxyethyl)-L-norvaline dehydrogenase,” Nat. Struct. Biol. 5(7): 593-601 (1998)). Another enzyme, N-methyl L-amino acid dehydrogenase from Pseudomonas putida (NMDH) is known to have activity similar to opine dehydrogenases, reacting with α-keto acids and alkyl amines, but appears to have little or no sequence homology to opine dehydrogenases and amino acid dehydrogenases. NMDH has been characterized as belonging to a new superfamily of NAD(P) dependent oxidoreductase (see e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 7,452,704 B2; Esaki et al., FEBS Journal 2005, 272, 1117-1123).
There is a need in the art for biocatalysts and processes for using them, under industrially applicable conditions, for the synthesis of chiral secondary and tertiary amines.